At 50, Hitchcock’s Timeless ‘Vertigo’ Still Offers a Dizzying Array of Gifts

Fifty years ago, Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Vertigo had its American premiere — in San Francisco, naturally, since that’s where Hitchcock had filmed it. In his eyes, the city’s timeless architecture and undulating streets were the perfect backdrop for a story of murder, treachery, and love so obsessive that the main character’s mind spins out of control.

Today the film is widely regarded as a masterpiece of world cinema, but in 1958 its prospects didn’t seem so bright. Advance publicity from Paramount Pictures had primed the public for a romantic thriller in the vein of previous Hitchcock hits, and the moody Vertigo was no such thing. In addition, Hitch was nervous about a screenplay decision he’d made, revealing the solution to the mystery with a third of the picture still to go. And marketers at Paramount didn’t like the title. Would moviegoers know what it meant? Even if they did, would it sell tickets?

Those forebodings proved accurate. The pace was too leisurely and the plot was too improbable for many critics, such as the New Yorker scribe who called it “far-fetched nonsense.” Panicked by weak ticket sales, Paramount yanked the offbeat posters for the film — cooked up by Hitchcock, they showed two silhouettes plummeting into an abstract spiral — and replaced them with ads emphasizing the San Francisco settings, murder-mystery plot, and glamorous stars. But the new campaign didn’t help. According to the Hitchcock authority Robert E. Kapsis, Vertigo earned substantially less money in its first year than Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) had grossed in comparable periods. Critically and commercially, Hitchcock’s daring thriller was an all-around disappointment.

Things were different in 1982, when Vertigo tied for seventh place in a survey of international critics asked to name the best movie of all time; in a 2002 update, it came in second, outpaced only by Citizen Kane (1941). In 1996 a restored edition opened to rapturous reviews and sizable grosses, confirming Vertigo as one of the belatedly acclaimed gems — others include It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), and yes, Citizen Kane — that started as letdowns at the box office.

Even devotees admire Vertigo more for the richness of its themes than the plausibility of its plot, which is indeed far-fetched but taps directly into Hitchcock’s lifelong absorption with the powers and problems of romantic love, the temptations of fantasy and illusion, and the myriad ways in which the act of seeing can inform, mislead, and betray us.

John (Scottie) Ferguson (James Stewart) is a detective who suffers a deep psychological trauma when he’s unable to prevent a fellow cop from falling to his death during a rooftop chase. After retiring from police work, he gets a call from an old college acquaintance named Gavin Elster, who asks Scottie to investigate the possibility that Elster’s wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), is being driven toward suicide by the spirit of Carlotta Valdes, a mad great-grandmother she never knew. Scottie gets one glimpse of Madeleine and falls instantly in love; accepting Elster’s assignment, he follows her around the city, seeking rational explanations for her strange behavior. When she describes a dream she’s had about an old church in the region, Scottie takes her there — and, evidently under Carlotta’s death-inducing sway, she races up the bell tower while Scottie’s acrophobia keeps him trapped below, paralyzed and helpless as a second fatal fall takes place before his eyes.

Scottie has a severe mental breakdown, partially recovers, and takes to roaming around the city much as Madeleine did, forever hoping she may miraculously reappear. Spotting a young woman named Judy who uncannily resembles Madeleine, he courts her and tries to mold her into Madeleine’s image, dictating the details of her clothing and hairstyle. Apparently in love with him, she puts up with that. But a flashback (spoiler alert!) informs us that Madeleine was actually Judy all along, helping Elster in a scheme to murder his wife. Judy acted the part of Madeleine so Scottie would bring her to the bell tower, knowing his acrophobia would make him witness the “suicide” without realizing that the victim was the real Madeleine, thrown to the ground while Elster and Judy hid from view. Scottie divines the truth when Judy puts on a necklace that only “Madeleine” could have had. Dazed and confused, he forces her back to the bell tower for a cathartic visit that momentarily rekindles his lost love, then extinguishes it for good.

“Isn’t it a fascinating design? You could study it forever,” said Hitchcock about Strangers on a Train, his 1951 thriller about another baroque homicide scheme. The same goes for Vertigo, which works the concept of vertiginous instability — mental, physical, romantic, moral — into almost every shot. It begins during the opening credits, accompanied by swirling spirals that transfix the viewer much as Scottie is transfixed by his false lover’s dark allure; and it extends to such a small particular as Madeleine’s hairstyle, pinned back in a twisting coil that echoes the film’s motif of descent into mystery and madness. Robert Burks’s camerawork vividly enhances the movie’s effectiveness, most famously in a 360-degree circular shot when Scottie is pitched into the past while kissing Judy, and in several zoom-in/track-out shots that make the movie screen itself seem to share in Scottie’s acrophobic terror. The music score by longtime Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann adds an exquisite crowning touch, blending upward and downward melodies not rooted in traditional scales; one needn’t be a musician to fall under its dizzying, almost hypnotic spell. And the acting stands with the best in any Hitchcock film. Stewart takes one of the boldest steps in his 1950s transition from romantic suavity to psychological complexity, and Novak gives the defining performance of her career as the enigmatic antiheroine.

Just as more books have been published on Hitchcock than on any other filmmaker, it’s likely that no Hitchcock movie has received more academic attention than Vertigo, as a quintessential embodiment of Hitchcock’s main artistic themes and a canonical tour de force in its own right.

The field of Hitchcock studies was launched in 1957 when two of his ardent French admirers, the future filmmakers Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, published Hitchcock. They argued that Hitch was not only a skilled technician and savvy entertainer but also a cinematic philosopher-poet whose movies probe a consistent set of intellectual concerns. Chief among them is the centrality of exchange in human affairs — exchange of emotions, of power, of knowledge, and, most important, of guilt. Rohmer and Chabrol concluded their project a year before Vertigo debuted, but their insights apply to it with uncanny precision. Think of Scottie’s assuming a ruinous burden of needless guilt, for example, because of Judy/Madeleine’s deceitful masquerade. In another influential move, the French critics teased out residues of the director’s Roman Catholic upbringing in his films, and scholars have been expanding on that theme ever since. Ditto for the ongoing research into Hitchcock’s interest in Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and other literary figures.

Academics have also found Vertigo to be the most concentrated distillation of Hitchcock’s fascination with the act of seeing, a favorite theme among film scholars for obvious reasons. The momentous glimpses, glances, looks, and stares exchanged by Scottie and Judy/Madeleine add up to a compendium of the gaze, illustrating its power to enthrall, gratify, deceive, and even destroy. Associating the Hitchcockian gaze with the patriarchal gaze, feminist critics like Laura Mulvey have often emphasized its harmful, authoritarian effects in Vertigo and elsewhere. More eclectic commentators take a broader view, however, finding more complexity in Hitchcock’s films than single-minded theories can encompass. In his recent book Hitchcock and Twentieth-Century Cinema (Wallflower Press, 2005), for instance, the film scholar John Orr says the fates of Hitchcock’s characters are “bound up with perceiving a world in flux,” just as the success of his films is “bound up with the spectator’s pleasurable act of perceiving [the characters] perceiving.” Hitchcock’s artistic vision is bound up with the nature of vision, and no film penetrates its mysteries more deeply than Vertigo does. For a generation of academics and critics, it has been a laboratory for investigating some of cinema’s most fundamental properties.

With all that going for it, why was Vertigo so badly misjudged in 1958? Multiple factors were at work. For one thing, Hitchcock wasn’t exactly on a roll; his previous picture, The Wrong Man (1956), had disappointed fans with its grim story of an honest man falsely pursued by the justice system, and they weren’t pleased when Vertigo again strayed from romantic-thriller territory. Then, too, the movie’s brooding pace and repetitive roaming scenes were a far cry from the rapid dramatic action of conventional thrillers. And the picture’s early revelation of the central mystery struck some moviegoers as a violation of the suspense genre’s unwritten rules — although Hitchcock would violate many more in Psycho two years later, with spectacular box-office results.

Controversy over Vertigo had another uptick when the 1996 restoration displeased Hitchcock purists with its rerecorded sound — the thump when Madeleine’s falling body hits the ground, for example, resounds too brightly for a film with such a nocturnal tone. But quibbles like that arise only among specialists; for others, the picture’s greatness is now beyond dispute.

To my mind, three aspects of Vertigo stand out above all others. One is its ingenuity in probing the nature of cinema itself. As perceptive critics have observed, Scottie is a surrogate for Hitchcock, transforming Judy into the fantasy character of his dreams. When her makeover into Madeleine is almost complete and Scottie sends her out to fix one final detail, he’s like a movie director ordering a retake so the shot will be precisely as he envisioned it. Hitchcock’s implicit commentary on his profession isn’t very flattering, moreover. Scottie is a control freak just like him, bending every contingency to the demands of his own will.

Related to this is the film’s exploration of how looking and seeing collude with fantasy and desire to shape our conceptions of the world. Scottie spends much of the film gazing at the woman who enthralls him, yet he remains pathetically ignorant of everything about her until a chance revelation makes his reveries come crashing down. Movies appeal directly to our sense of sight, so Hitchcock was going boldly against the grain by taking such a relentlessly ironic view of vision’s role in shaping — and misshaping — human experience.

Most remarkable of all is this suspense picture’s radical approach to suspense. Scottie ends the first scene dangling from a drainpipe high above the streets, and he begins the second scene in his friend Midge’s comfortable apartment. How did he get from the drainpipe to the easy chair? We never find out, which means that, metaphorically, Scottie is in suspense throughout the rest of the story — suspended between Madeleine and Judy, desire and despair, reality and fantasy, living and dying. In the final shot, he’s again gazing down at a lifeless body: the corpse of Judy, now unveiled as the duplicitous lover who caught him in a web of murder and deceit.

On the surface, Vertigo is a luminous, engrossing thriller. In its depths, it’s a probing study of a man whose ardor for a dead woman becomes the consuming passion of his life. No wonder Samuel Taylor, one of the screenplay’s co-authors, once suggested an alternate title that would never have passed the censors: “To Lay a Ghost."n

David Sterritt, chair of the National Society of Film Critics, is a film professor at Columbia University and the Maryland Institute College of Art. His books include The Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Cambridge University Press, 1993).

http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 40, Page B18